So far we have stressed the animal nature of man, but have distinguished him from the
beasts because of his heightened consciousness (which, among other things, has given
him the capacity to deny or worship the power that may have designed him). Language is not unique to man, since all creatures have various means of
communication, and even the use of tools is only an extension of nature, although our
resultant technologies clearly give us enormous advantages over all other species.

There are, however, some areas of our lives in which we appear to differ strikingly
from the beasts: we have an insatiable curiosity which has led to the pursuit of
knowledge for its own sake. Animals may be inquisitive, but there is no reason to
suppose that they will investigate the world’s phenomena for any reason other than
their relevance to survival. We, however, need to know. It’s true that the practical
applications of science fit in with the whole evolutionary process as it pushes on
towards some kind of perfection, but we will investigate all things, regardless of
practical value. We are aware of mysteries, and are uncomfortable until we have
solved them. The atheist would argue that religion is a misguided attempt to solve a
mystery by manufacturing a solution that entails another mystery, whereas the
believer would argue that atheism is a misguided attempt to solve a mystery by
claiming that there is no mystery.

Of all our human activities, art (by which I mean the arts in general) is the one that
seems to take us furthest away from the animals whose ancestry we share. Music
above all epitomizes the aesthetic sense which transcends understanding. The animal
kingdom produces its own sounds, of course, but so far as we know, these are
functional and form part of the communicatory processes. They are indispensable to
survival. Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is indispensable to no-one, and yet we rank it as
a supreme human achievement. (If you don’t, then substitute any piece of art that you
regard as supreme.) Some of the greatest minds in our culture pay homage to the work
of the composers, the painters, the sculptors, the writers, and our lives would be
infinitely poorer without them. And yet generally speaking, they are of no practical
value. Literature comes closest to practicality in so far as it may provide usable
insights into the way the human mind and human society function; painting and
sculpture may challenge our modes of perception, or draw our attention to facets of
the world we might otherwise be unaware of. But how many poems or novels,
paintings or sculptures, have actually changed the way the world functions? Not even
the plays of Shakespeare – although they have spawned a vast industry and keep
thousands of people in employment – can be described as indispensable or even
contributory to the survival and continuation of our species. Music, though, is the art
most remote from the practical world, and its appeal presents an insurmountable
challenge to our understanding.

Why should a combination of sounds with no articulate meaning (let us, for
argument’s sake, consider only instrumental music here) have such a profound effect
on us? We can be plunged into darkest melancholy, or whipped up into a celebratory
frenzy, and yet there is nothing tangible to direct us. Why do I want to weep at the end
of Tschaikovsky’s 6th Symphony? Why do I want to cheer at the end of Brahms’s
2nd? Why do I melt within at the adagio of Schubert's C-major String Quintet? Why
do I want to wave my arms, tap my feet, dance like a dervish during the last
movement of Beethoven’s 7th?

In everyday life we experience emotions such as love, fear, joy, etc. without
questioning what processes actually take place to make us “feel” them. We take them
– as we take most of our functions, both physical and mental – for granted (until they
go wrong). I blink, breathe, sit, stand, move, etc. without ever thinking about how I do
it. The body takes over as soon as the mind decides on an action – or if it is an
ongoing action like breathing, the body performs it without my even instructing it to
do so. Emotions are the same: my “feeling” of love, fear, joy comes automatically
according to the situation, and I do not ask what is going on inside me. I merely relate
the feeling to the situation. With music, there is not even a situation to relate to. Only
meaningless sounds. To a degree, the same applies to art and sculpture – whatever the
nature of their appeal, they are normally unrelated to our own, real lives. Why, then,
do they “move” us?

The question inevitably takes us back to origins. In terms of the purely physical
universe, where do emotions and aesthetics spring from? Remember that the atheist’s
starting point is mindlessness – total inanimateness. Even if you can accept the
extraordinary coincidence of inanimate matter forming itself at one and the same time
into something live and able to reproduce itself, what gave birth to the hitherto nonexistent
and – so far as we know – also non-physical spheres of “feeling” and,
especially, of artistic expression, which in itself is of no practical value (the crucial
force that drives evolution)?

There is an additional mystery here. Any writer who visits a primary school will
confirm that one of the most frequently asked questions is: “Where do you get your
ideas?” Small children are aware of the problem, even if they do not see its
implications. In the creation of artworks, there are strange mechanisms in operation.
Ideas generally spring from the so-called subconscious mind. Suddenly, out of the
blue, a writer will get an idea: some will then begin to plan their tale, whereas others
will simply allow the idea to develop of its own accord. Even those who plan will tell
you that more often than not the characters force them to abandon the plan. They take
on a life of their own. We do not understand the mechanism ourselves, but it can be
summed up by something Michelangelo once said – namely, that the statue was
already in the marble; he only had to find it.

The artist knows what he is doing – he is conscious of sculpting, painting,
composing or writing – but in most instances he feels that the material is guiding him
rather than the other way round. Of course, if you take away the brain, or even a
certain part of the brain, the composer will stop composing, but the same applies if
you take away the heart or the lungs or the liver. No-one is claiming that in this life
we function without our physical casing. The question here is why physical matter is
able to produce concepts that have nothing to do with physical matter, or with the
survival of that physical matter. The atheist may say that this, like all organs and
organic processes, is the result of chance mutations which create totally new though
primitive phenomena, and these become more sophisticated as time goes by. Chance
created a D, and then over thousands of years the D converted itself into Beethoven’s
9th. But why should it have done so?

Scepticism over the creative powers of chance will not, however, answer the
primary school question: where do ideas come from? The honest answer is: we don’t
know. And we should not pretend that we do. But we can speculate. If there is a
designer, and if that designer is not a physical being like ourselves, it is possible that
the force that gives us life (I have called it the “spirit”) is also possessed of the nonphysical
emotions and aesthetics we have been discussing. This makes the artist a
vehicle – the material is not coming from him but through him, although he may have
to work on it many times because he is not a pure filter. In other words, those
elements of our nature that are not physical may have a non-physical source.

A religious artist will claim that his inspiration comes directly from God. God is
dictating to him, and it is only because his “hearing” is imperfect that he is sometimes
forced to work on the dictation – perfecting it until he is satisfied that he has come as
close as possible to the message transmitted from on high. An atheist will claim that
the “message” emanates from globules of matter emitting electrical impulses that
somehow by sheer chance have developed a sense of aesthetics. An agnostic will
admit that he is mystified. There is no shame in this, and there is if anything a great
deal more excitement, because an unsolved mystery is always infinitely more
fascinating than one that has been solved.

Of particular interest is the possible parallel between the playwright/novelist and the
designer. One must acknowledge the fact that if there is a designer, we do not know
where its ideas come from either, but that is no proof that there is no designer, any
more than our ignorance of the playwright’s source is proof that there is no
playwright. The parallel, however, lies in the autonomy of the characters. If we
imagine the designer now as the writer, it comes up with its brilliant idea of living
creatures imbued with its own spirit, and then eventually hits on the variation of
characters with complete consciousness of themselves. From then on, it watches – and
maybe even records – what they do. According to the Bible, it occasionally interferes,
but eventually it probably decides not to do so. The characters themselves must run
the story, with built-in natural disasters to maintain a degree of unpredictability and to
present renewed challenges.

This scenario at least has the advantage that it explains many of the problems that
face religious believers. There is free will, humans are subjected to suffering that is
partly of their own making but partly caused by nature as created by the designer,
prayers may or may not be answered because of the law of averages (for example, if
both sides pray to God before a battle, one of them will have its prayers answered),
some crises will be resolved and some will not, and the co-existence of good and evil
springs from the designer itself. Once you accept the principle that a design in some
way reflects the designer, many of the trickier theological questions become
remarkably simple.